finance and society shared stakes, distributed investment

Shared stakes, distributedinvestment: Socially engaged art andthe financialization of social impact

Corresponding author:Emily Rosamond, Arts University Bournemouth, Poole, Dorset BH12 5HH, UK.Email: [email protected]

Emily RosamondArts University Bournemouth, UK

Abstract

This article examines the implications of the financialization of social impact and the emergingsocial impact bonds (SIBs) market for socially engaged art practices. How do SIBs, which allowfor investment in social impact metrics, shift the broader contexts through which the value ofsocial impact is understood in art discourses? In the British context, recent projects byAssemble, Open School East and others do important social work, yet echo the logic of thesocial investment market by outsourcing social impact. Rather than dismissing sociallyengaged art initiatives as having been recuperated by financialized capitalism, I suggest theneed to develop new ways of achieving a double reading of these works as they relate to – andupset the distinctions between – stakeholder and bondholder valuation.

Keywords

Socially engaged art, social impact bonds, social impact investing, financialization

Introduction

Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Untitled (Free) (1992): an art gallery transformed into a makeshift kitchen,where visitors could come for conversation and Thai food. Suzanne Lacy’s Storying Rape(2012): a choreographed conversation that brought together media, politicians, law enforcersand activists in order to discuss how to reframe narratives concerning violence againstwomen. The Turkish art collective Oda Projesi’s ongoing collaborations with their neighbors inan apartment in Galata, Istanbul (1997-present). These are but a few projects in a longtradition of socially engaged art. Such projects often seek to avoid producing a rarefied, reifiedart object. Instead, they focus on collaboration, community, and social space. Often, suchprojects attempt to make a positive impact on a particular community. As curator Maria Lind(2004) summarized Oda Projesi’s work: “Activities vary, but a common denominator is thatthey are not about showing or exhibiting a work of art but about using art as a means for

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creating and recreating new relations between people through diverse investigations andshaping of both private and public space”. This description could easily be extended tocharacterize the aims of many other socially engaged projects.

Since the late 1990s, socially engaged art projects have become increasingly visiblewithin art discourses. Art historians and critics have waged heady debates as to whatconstitutes the value of such projects. For instance, should their value be evaluated ethically,or aesthetically? What conceptions of, and interventions in, a social space are valuable – towhom, and why? Often, such analyses take for granted that socially engaged artworks are atleast partially opposed to the art market, insofar as their value is understood as social,ameliorative and/or discursive, rather than financial (as in art practices revolving around thesale of costly art objects). Yet even if this is true for certain socially engaged projects, it hasbecome less obvious that social and financial values can be so easily separated from oneanother. In light of this, I want to examine a recent development which has the potential todrastically reshape the broader context for socially engaged artworks, yet whose implicationsfor socially engaged art have yet to be systematically theorized. I call this development thefinancialization of social impact.

By the financialization of social impact, I mean the development of financial products thatencourage private investment in specific social impact metrics. In particular, I focus on thedevelopment of the social impact bond (SIB) since 2010 as paradigmatic of a broader,emerging phenomenon of the financialization of social impact. SIBs are contracts betweeninvestors and the public sector, administered through intermediary companies, which outline acommitment to pay for improvements in social outcomes that could lead to public savings, atleast in theory. For instance, Social Finance, Ltd. has created social impact bonds to financeoutcomes from prisoner rehabilitation in Peterborough to schemes for helping rough-sleepersin London. Investors provide start-up capital for charity-run social programs; if agreed socialimpact targets are met, governments pay investors at a fixed rate of return. SIBs attempt torealize a mutuality of interest between investors, governments and non-profits seeking tomake a difference to at-risk groups.

How might the financialization of social impact necessitate new understandings of thecontexts for socially engaged art practices to come, thereby impacting how their value is to beunderstood? This article is a preliminary and necessarily speculative attempt torecontextualize some recent socially engaged art discourses with respect to thefinancialization of social impact. As the SIB market is still quite new, it is too early to saywhether the specific investment structures initiated there will directly impact the art market ona broad scale (for instance, by funding particular socially engaged art projects, based onpricing their ability to improve specific social impact metrics). However, since I am taking SIBsto be paradigmatic of a broader phenomenon of financialized social impact, it will not be myaim to trace such direct connections. Rather, I wish to examine the abstract alignments thatSIBs instantiate by aligning governments’, investors’, service providers’ and beneficiaries’interests – what Maurizio Lazzarato might understand as the asignifying semiotics of a socialdiagram. This is a structure of networked relation or command (for instance, within a team ofoffice workers) that influences the shape of communications, and thereby orders the politicalwork directors and other decision-makers undertake when setting agendas for anorganization, even without producing a direct sign (Lazzarato, 2014: 113-14).

After a section situating my use of the term financialization and analysing the socialalignments instantiated by the social impact bond, I then analyse how these new abstractalignments – especially those between investors and beneficiary subjects – might complicate,challenge and nuance the ways in which contemporary art discourses understand the value of

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social impact, with reference to some recent examples: Assemble’s Turner Prize win, and OpenSchool East and School of the Damned’s responses to the introduction of £9,000 per yearuniversity tuition fees across the UK in 2012, after a fee cap rise following the Browne Reviewin 2010. Finally, I situate these claims within a history of socially engaged art discourses.

Throughout, it will become apparent that the financialization of social impact, exemplifiedby the social impact bond, nullifies claims (already criticized from many other angles) that actsof social engagement (packaged, at times, within art practices) sit separate from the market,ameliorate alienation, or put something ‘genuine’ back into the reified realm of commodityexchange. Yet, given that social impact bonds envision, and instantiate, new ways to intertwinesocial investor interests and stakeholder interests (in other words, the participants in a project,and/or those affected by its interventions), it is necessary to experiment with analyticalmethods for evaluating socially engaged art practices within a financialized, post-SIB contextwithout simply dismissing socially engaged projects as exemplars of financialization. Thinkingof SIBs as abstract social diagrams exemplary of a broader contextual shift suggests thatfinancialized social impact requires the development of ways to read the valences, andimplications, of socially engaged art projects doubly, as they relate to, on the one hand,investor interests and, on the other hand, stakeholder interests. To borrow a term often usedin the social investment community, such projects need to be understood according to a‘double bottom line’. In other words, they need to be seen as both social and immediatelyfinancial; as both participated-in by stakeholders and productive of investment-images ofparticipation within (and beyond) the broader commerce of art discourse.

Social impact bonds and the financialization of social impact

In order to develop a double reading of stakeholder and investor interests in socially engagedart, I must further develop my sketch of the financialization of social impact by referring bothto discourses on financialization and by detailing the development of SIBs. In this section, myprincipal claim will be that, as an abstract social diagram, SIBs (which exemplify thefinancialization of social impact) bring investor and stakeholder interests into a new alignment.In subsequent sections, I introduce this claim into the context of contemporary art, arguingthat the new alignment necessitates a discursive shift in socially engaged art discourses.

Financialization

Firstly, in what sense do I mean ‘financialization’? With over a decade of scholarship onfinancialization to reckon with, the meaning of this term is not self-evident, and my definitionof the financialization of social impact involves recombining different strains of financializationdiscourses. As Van der Zwan (2014) has argued, there are, broadly speaking, three tendencieswithin studies of financialization. One strain understands financialization as a new regime ofaccumulation, and thus emphasizes the figure of the rentier as a paradigm of non-productiveaccumulation. A second strain focuses on corporate structuring, and emphasizes the role ofshareholder value as part of a new distribution of managerial power. Finally, a third strainfocuses on financialization as a form of governmentality, which encourages people tounderstand their daily lives in financial terms.

My approach to the financialization of social impact combines (and slightly refocuses)elements of the first and third strains in Van der Zwan’s schema. On the one hand, seen fromthe perspective of investors, SIBs express a new regime of accumulation which encourages


social impact investors to speculate on social impact, while governments respond to a crisis ofcapital accumulation by inviting social impact investors to inject privatized social welfareservices with start-up funds. On the other hand, the development of social impact metricsoperates through a financialization of daily life. Social impact investors speculate onbehavioral shifts in beneficiary populations, who may be encouraged to improve their personallives (for instance, by not reoffending after they have left prison) through participating inprograms funded by SIBs. Such changes of personal habit, in turn, are precisely what investorsspeculate on when they purchase SIBs. In short, SIBs embed investors’ stakes into theeveryday personal and social experiences of beneficiaries, whether the latter are aware of thisor not.

The financialization of social impact is but one arena in which, as Chiapello (2015) hasrecently argued, inherently financial forms of valuation are colonizing non-financial activities.Although such a colonization of daily life by the financialized logic of pricing risk is indeedtaking place, this need not necessarily be understood by the beneficiaries whose behavioralchanges are being priced. Many accounts of the financialization of daily life emphasize theways in which individuals are trained to understand their own lives in financial terms (forinstance see Martin, 2002). The way of situating the term ‘financialization’ I have presentedhere instead focuses on the ways in which there is a doubling of financialized perspectives,whereby investors are given a stake in improving beneficiaries’ habits, which is aligned with,yet still remains separate from, the stake the latter might have in changing their own habits.Whether beneficiaries of a social impact project are aware of it or not, the investor'sperspective – and the logic of investment that comes with it – creeps in as a backgroundprecondition. It is part of an abstract social diagram that aligns beneficiaries' and investors'interests, even if on quite uneven terms (as we shall see below).

The rise of the social impact bond

To get a clearer sense of how SIBs function as an unconscious background condition for socialimpact scenarios, it is necessary to sketch the rise of the social impact bond. In this section, Iam not aiming to give a technical account of SIBs, which have complex implications forbusiness, law, risk assessment, impact measurability and policy. Instead, I give an overview ofSIBs oriented towards understanding the social diagram – the alignments betweenstakeholder and investor interests that might be most transferrable to socially engaged artdiscourse. As Schram (2015: 155, 229) argues, the basic concept that would eventually returnin the form of SIBs was developed in 1988 by Ronnie Horesh, a New Zealand economist whoproposed what he called “social policy bonds”. Horesh believed that the investment structurehe invented would suit high-risk, experimental programs (for unemployment, homelessness,and child welfare, among others) for which governments were not willing to assume risk(Schram, 2015: 156). Over twenty years later in 2010, the UK became the world's SIBinnovation leader, promoting social welfare improvements more broadly, rather than usingSIBs to back particularly experimental programs.

The world’s first SIB was managed by Social Finance, London – a financial intermediarycompany founded in 2007 to address a “funding shortfall in the social sector” (Social Finance,2016). Social Finance gathered approximately £5 million in investment capital from charitiesand private investors for a pilot program, launched on 10 September, 2010, which aimed toreduce recidivism rates among short-term male prisoners (serving sentences of less than 12months) at Peterborough prison (Disley et al., 2011: 3). This SIB set its social impact target at

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a 10% reduction in recidivism for each of its three cohorts, or a 7.5% reduction overall acrossthe three cohorts for the seven years of the full term (Disley et al., 2011: 3; Birkwood, 2014).The final cohort did not enter the program, as the Ministry of Justice cancelled the pilot (whichcut the SIB’s full term down from seven years to six). Investors missed an opportunity for earlypayout in 2014, when a study by QinetiQ (a multinational defence technology company basedin Britain) and the University of Leicester concluded that recidivism had dropped by 8.3% andnot the 10% required for an early payout (Birkwood, 2014). Nonetheless, Social Finance Ltd.remains hopeful that, based on the two cohorts remaining in the program, investors will seereturns in 2016 (Birkwood, 2014). This remains to be seen at the time of writing.

Although commonly associated with the Cameron government in the British context, theSIB was initially a Blair-era Labour initiative, which the subsequent Conservative-LiberalDemocrat coalition government adopted. Thus, Callanan notes, there was enthusiasm in theinvestor community about SIBs’ potential to ‘cross the floor’, uniting the interests of a broaderspectrum of parties and practitioners (Miller et al., 2012). Although the first British pilot wascancelled midway through, the SIB has gained much traction worldwide since 2010, with theUK as the world leader. As of early 2014, there were 14 SIBs in the UK, which targeted a rangeof social problems, most of which could be addressed through support aimed toward behaviormodification. These include reducing recidivism, providing foster care and addressinghomelessness (Instiglio, 2014; Kalin, 2014). There are also several SIBs emerging in the US,along with pilot programs in many other countries (among them Canada, Ireland, Australia,India, Uganda and South Africa). In addition, intermediary companies such as Social Financeare developing ways to expand the logic of SIBs into the development impact market in theGlobal South, leading to the development impact bond (DIB) (Kalin, 2014).

The social impact bond is, of course, not entirely unique; it bears the marks of a longerhistory of tools and techniques for valuating and operationalizing social impact. This historywould include, for instance, the broader development of Payment by Results (PBR) publicpolicy instruments (of which SIBs are one variety) (Disley et al., 2011: 1). PBR instrumentsallow governments to make payments contingent on independently verified results. The SIB isby no means the first or the only instrument of the financialization of social impact. Yetwhereas previous PBR schemes paid service providers directly for results (meaning thatcharities delivering social services would have to wait until a program had ended to receivepayment), the SIB addresses this time gap by introducing investors and intermediaries into themix, which allows service providers to get capital upfront. Their innovative structureinstantiates a unique geometry of connections between government agencies, externalorganizations, investors, service providers, and beneficiaries. In doing so, SIBs exemplify,instantiate and even theorize, in their very form, an incisive social diagram, a kind offinancialized social diagram which epitomizes a new investment-logic of social impact. As anewly emerging (and potentially, in the future, hegemonic) configuration of relations betweenshareholders and stakeholders in social impact, SIBs have much to teach socially engaged artdiscourses about the relations between finance and society as they might develop in years tocome.

SIBs as an abstract social diagram

What I am calling the abstract social diagram of SIBs can best be explored with the help ofFigure 1 below, which visualizes the basic structure of aligned interests that Peterborough-style SIBs imagine and enact. In the center of the arrangement, an external organization (in


the case of the Peterborough bond, Social Finance, Ltd.) develops the financial product. Indoing so, it mediates between a government agency (in this case, the Ministry of Justice), anumber of investors (here, £5 million from individuals and charities, including the LankellyChase Foundation) (Birkwood, 2014), and one or more service providers (including the St.Giles Trust). The latter, in turn, work with a beneficiary population. Governments agree to payfor targets in a fixed term, according to a fixed rate by outcome. (In this case, the pilot wasinitially intended to last seven years, though it has been cut short – and a 7.5% overallreduction leads to a payback from governments to investors.) Missing in the diagram are theexternal assessor(s) – in the Peterborough case, QinetiQ, University of Leicester and RANDEurope – who independently evaluate whether the desired impact outcomes have beenattained. SIBs are not technically bonds, which pay a fixed interest (Schram, 2015: 155;Whistler et al., 2014). SIBs pay by result. As Callanan notes (in Miller et al., 2012), theoutcomes for SIBs, among investors, are conceptualized as a 'double bottom line' (DBL or2BL): a potential fiscal gain paired with a positive social impact. There are many kinds ofinvestors, Callanan notes, who are showing interest in SIBs worldwide. Even for what sheterms the ‘socially agnostic investor’ (a euphemism for one concerned with profit more thansocial impact), SIBs have a strong potential appeal in terms of portfolio diversification, sincethe success or failure of a program to reach a target social impact outcome might beuncorrelated with market growth.

Figure 1. The Peterborough-style social impact bond. Source: Kohli, Besharov and Costa (2012)

The social diagram that SIBs instantiate is, indeed, so effective and appealing to partiesat all levels, in interlocking the varied interests of its participants, that Callanan remarks that,when she and her colleagues were first introduced to SIBs, they wondered if the latter werePonzi schemes; they seemed too good to be true (in Miller et al., 2012). At a SIB panel at the

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Social Capital Markets conference in 2014, panellists on ‘The Complex Anatomy of SocialImpact Bonds’ panel representing a range of perspectives on SIBs – including representativesfrom investment firms backing and assessing risk in SIBs, legal teams contributing pro-bonowork to drafting complex SIB contracts, service providers and government officials – spoke ofa broad range of benefits to SIBs. These included a greater ability to focus on outcomes andthus increase the effectiveness of social programs; greater flexibility for non-profit serviceproviders, since the latter can innovate and change course when needed, because of theemphasis on outcome, rather than a particular methodology; an increased ability of non-profits to scale up their services to benefit larger groups; and the ability to bring many playersto the table such as investors and non-profits in order to increase mutual understanding(Whistler et al., 2014). Gary Graves, chief operating officer of Santa Clara County, remarkedthat his county was even willing to pay for an SIB-backed outcome – a reduction inhomelessness – which would not lead to a future government saving. This was because theCounty believed that a reduction in homelessness was an important social aim. It also viewedan SIB-backed program as the most efficient way to achieve this outcome.

Critiques of SIBs

A number of critics have noted drawbacks to this new alignment of interests. These includedifficulties with devising metrics for social impact; difficulties with measurement and riskassessment; and a tendency to favour (and fund) only outcomes that can be readily quantified(Whistler et al., 2014). More fundamentally, as Schram (2015) notes, one of the maincriticisms of SIBs is that they effectively privatize the welfare state, quietly taking power andcontrol over social welfare programs out of the public interest – and effectively allowing richinvestors to siphon profits off of social impact, by means of a speculative (and predatory)valuation of “projected future government savings”. Dowling and Harvie (2014: 870), for theirpart, argue for the need to analyze what they call the “political economy of big society”instantiated through SIBs: “the state – partly as a response to its own fiscal crisis – is furtherretreating from the sphere of social reproduction, placing the associated costs onto the unpaidrealms of the home and the community”.

While investors front the capital, it is largely workers in the non-profit sector (not tomention the served populations, who must invest effort in the programs in order for them tosucceed) who, perhaps out of a genuine urge to restore something in the social fabric, willwork for investors’ profit. (As will become clear in subsequent sections, this analysis could beextended to include artists who invest their free labor in social projects.) This results in a“deepening of capitalist disciplinary logics into the social fabric” (Dowling and Harvie, 2014:870-71). Governments, so the criticism goes, should ideally still be willing to pay for socialprograms, to keep them thoroughly in the purview of public interest. Even Andi Phillips, socialinvesting expert and Vice President of Goldman Sachs, agrees: “I am right there with all of youwho say that, but that is not the world we live in” (in Whistler et al., 2014). Social needs exceedwhat governments are currently able or willing to pay for; thus, SIBs, in Phillips’ view, representa best-case scenario for achieving social impact outcomes. The double bottom line preservesand protects social impact outcomes, by infusing them with capital. Yet, as Dowling (2016) andOgman (2016) point out, such a perspective should be questioned. After all, as Dowling (2016:12) notes, a variety of institutions that promote SIBs have undertaken “considerable efforts toproduce consent to impact investing”. Furthermore, in the case of the Peterborough SIB, forinstance, the SIB-backed scheme did reduce recidivism, but it did not save governments


money. Thus, governments found themselves increasing expenditure overall and “formingspecial ‘outcome funds’ to pay investor returns” (Ogman, 2016: 59).

The double bottom line lauded by Phillips exemplifies the financialization of social impact:a new way to bring the ‘greater social good’ (particularly as it is conceptualized, and targetedtoward a philanthropic response to disadvantaged groups who would cost the state) into linewith the interests of the investing class. It does so such that it privileges investor gains overgovernment savings as it outsources social impact funding. Moreover, as Dowling (2016: 12)reminds us, there is widespread concern that any savings governments are likely to make as aresult of SIB-backed initiatives may ultimately be at the cost of care workers, who might facemore precarious working conditions and lower pay when dependent on SIB-backed care work.In Dowling’s view, SIBs reflect a form of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2004),whereby “public funds are being privatized through the use of financial instruments such asSIBs” (Dowling, 2016: 9). This accumulation by dispossession is arguably all the more effectivefor the ease with which SIBs create seemingly seamless alignments between investor andstakeholder interests, even as they fail to disrupt the vast power imbalances betweeninvestors, charities and beneficiaries.

Investor-stakeholder alignments

To get an even more vivid sense of how SIBs’ abstract social diagram produces new investor-stakeholder alignments, it is useful to briefly consider the ways in which Social Financepromotes its own social value. New forms of financial backing – and with them, new forms ofperformative pressure – rest squarely on beneficiaries’ shoulders, whose very re-habituationbecomes investors’ bread and butter. In a promotional video on Social Finance’s website, areformed former Peterborough prisoner helped by the world’s first SIB-backed programsspeaks to the camera, perfectly performing the shared stakes and distributed investment ofthe double bottom line. “Although it’s me that’s changed, it’s through them, if you like,” hesays:

It’s knowing that you’ve got that support there, if you need someone to ring up, and you need a bit of help…whether it’s with your housing, whether it’s with your benefits, or whatever… rather than… just having oneoption: and that’s to commit crime. … It’s massive for me. It makes me feel good inside. It makes me feelbetter all round, really. You have to work just as hard as everybody else… If it weren’t for… the supportgroup, I wouldn’t have understood that, simple as – ’cause I didn’t have this frame of mind last year. (SocialFinance, 2014)

The camera cuts to a field of flowers, gently blowing in the breeze. The reformed prisonerseems, for all intents and purposes, to be genuinely happier, better adjusted and wellsupported. In his better adjustment, he enacts the double bottom line: the attitudes andaffects that accrue investment-image status through the video, and tacitly whisper SocialFinance logic. Reproductive care – care for the social through care for character – becomesboth a personal interest and a distributed investor interest, as it is expropriated to the upperechelons of the investment world.

Thus far I have developed an account of the financialization of social impact through fivelenses: (1) from the perspective of discourses on financialization; (2) by considering the rise ofthe SIB as an exemplar of the financialization of social impact; (3) by considering the SIB asabstract social diagram which exemplifies the financialization of social impact; (4) throughcritiques of SIBs; and (5) by examining the ways in which Social Finance has ‘voiced’ its social

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impact through the voice of one of its beneficiaries. These avenues for analysis reveal a socialdiagram that innovatively aligns stakeholder and investor interests through a double bottomline, such that investors’ interests seem to be consistent with social impact.

Parables of social engagement and investment

This diagram represents a newly prevalent alignment of stakeholder and investor interests insocial impact according to a double bottom line of social and financial gain. How might thisnew alignment serve as a context for socially engaged contemporary art practice? In thissection, I develop some initial prospective methods for differentiating between doubledstakeholder and investor interests in socially engaged art practices. I do so, first, by examiningtwo scenes in which social improvement acts as theme, as goal, and perhaps even as fetish inrecent British art. I then discuss how these projects’ value might be understood with respect tothe double bottom line inherent to the financialization of social impact, which acts as abroader background condition against which the events and images associated with each ofthese projects unfolds.

Let us begin with Scene One. The Stratford, London-based architecture and designcollective Assemble win the 2015 Turner Prize at an awards ceremony at Tramway, Glasgow.They were nominated for their housing projects at Granby Four Streets, Liverpool. Aggravatedby a glut of predatory, top-down regeneration plans for the city, the collective sought tocollaborate with local residents and support their vision for the area by renovating dilapidatedold houses and protecting them from demolition. They launched the Granby Workshopsthrough their Turner Prize exhibition: a platform through which local residents can make andsell a range of design products using recycled materials from refurbished sites, the profits ofwhich are then reinvested back into the community.

Assemble’s project was widely praised by both participants and onlookers. Nevertheless,many viewed the Turner Prize jury’s selection of an architectural collective with apprehension.Even Assemble were surprised. One member, featured in a TateShots video, describes thenomination as quite uncomfortable for the project and the group, since it rarefied localresidents’ activities by labelling them “art” (Tate, 2015). Another, when asked whether thegroup’s project was ‘art’ in a Guardian article, remarked: “For us it’s not that important: it’s anacademic discussion. We are more interested in doing good projects … Sometimes that’sabout doing really good plumbing” (Higgins, 2015). As Gayford (2015) notes, the decision toview Assemble’s project as art came neither from the group itself, nor from their participants,but from the curator who nominated them. A strange geometry of designation unfolds, whichtrades in social impact. The boldness of the curator’s pronunciation – as if to wave a magicwand that turns ‘projects’ into ‘art’ – speaks to the odd relationship (expressed by the Prize farmore than the project) between professionalized, sanctioned art world actors and socialoutcomes. On the one hand, the Turner Prize selection expresses a keenly felt desire, withinand outside of the art world, to counter austerity measures and the privatized, financializedregeneration outcomes to which these lead. On the other hand, citizens of the hermetic upperechelons of the art world, arguably, enact a voracious – perhaps even predatory – appetite foroutsiders, for impact, for the look and feel of social engagement.

Scene Two unfolds across a few locations within and beyond East London. Responding tosoaring tuition fees and unmanageable financial hardship for artists and students, a spate ofopen art schools emerges. Open School East, which occupies a former community centre andlibrary in East London, opened its doors in 2013. It offers a free study programme foremerging artists, with the aim to foster exchanges between artists and the broader public.


School of the Damned (SOTD) produced its first graduating class of its non-accredited MA artprogram in 2014. Their program is run entirely by participating students, with some help froman ever-evolving roster of visiting lecturers and artists, many of whom teach at universitieselsewhere. No money changes hands. SOTD runs nomadically; they exist, as they say, as “awebsite and a google drive account” (School of the Damned, 2016). Both Open School Eastand School of the Damned have been widely applauded for the quality of their work, and forproviding a much-needed alternative to the university in an austerity context. Indeed, theyunderstand their stance as outsiders to the financialized field of higher education as political.School of the Damned’s website declares: “The school does not receive any money, pay for anyresources using funds, or charge its students admission. The school runs outside institutionalsystems of funding as an active political position. Guests are invited on a pre-agreed exchangeof time for time labour” (School of the Damned, 2016).

Certainly, neither Assemble, nor Open School East, nor School of the Damned work withSIBs directly. Nor do they intentionally adopt a financialized conception of social value or socialimpact. In fact, the aim might be quite the opposite; particularly in the second scene, the freeart schools understand themselves as actively resisting financialization by resisting theremunerated exchange of services. Nonetheless, both of these cases involve circulatingimages of a positive social impact (whether intentionally or not) within and beyond theboundaries of the respective projects (for instance, as participants experience these impacts,but also as such impacts are reported on, framed and circulated in news articles, videos, andso on by non-participants). Images of these socially impactful projects circulate within abroader social context in which the financialization of social impact is quietly but pervasivelytaking hold. Thus, quite aside from the question of whether these projects have a positiveimpact on their participants (which they certainly seem to do), or whether they directlyinstantiate a financialized conception of social impact, there is another, tactical question as tohow such projects participate in, collude with or resist broader shifts in the valuation of socialimpact. Thus, the value of such projects must be understood doubly, according to both thestakeholder interests of their participants, and the ‘investor interests’ of all those who benefitfrom circulating images, narratives, accounts and/or metrics relating to those social impacts.

What might be learned from these projects for developing a ‘double bottom line’ readingof stakeholder and investor interests in socially engaged art projects? Further, how could onedevelop such a reading, so that it is not focused on a direct engagement with thefinancialization of social impact, but rather understands the financialization of social impactas a part of the broader social context within which such projects operate (particularly in theBritish context)? In other words, how can one transpose the diagrammatic doubling ofstakeholder and investor interests that SIBs instantiate, and use this to inform a doubledstakeholder/investor account of the value of socially engaged art?

For one thing, adopting a double bottom line reading of socially engaged projectscounters the facile claim that such projects – and particularly those that do not directlygenerate financial value – are necessarily outside of, or antithetical to, financial investment orexchange. As much as Open School East and School of the Damned provide a much-neededalternative to costly education, they also operate in a context in which a financialized logic ofsocial impact directly operationalizes social reproductive labor that is outsourced into thevolunteer realm. After all, as Dowling and Harvie argue (2014), the SIB extends the BritishConservative Party’s failed ‘Big Society’ ideology by other means. As Dowling and Harvie argue,Big Society – the Cameron government’s vision of a voluntarist conservatism, whichoutsourced government services by mobilizing citizens’ desire to care for their neighbors, andencouraging them to volunteer for the public good – clearly failed as an ideology.

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Nevertheless, Dowling and Harvie argue, this ideology still continues to operate through theoutsourcing of government services to independent, private social service providers via SIBs.In a similar vein, Sanford Schram (2015: 153) has argued that “Social impact bonds representnothing less than the financialization of the welfare state”. Indeed, broadly speaking, thevoluntarist desire to care for at-risk populations – to do the work of social reproduction – hasnever been so closely, and so effectively, aligned with investor interests. Given this realignmentof voluntarism with investor interests, a given socially engaged art project’s opposition tofinancialized valuation may only pertain to one of its two ‘bottom lines’.

Furthermore, many debates in contemporary art tend to understand ‘social engagement’as something that happens within the boundaries of a particular participatory project – inother words, between live, active participants – even though in many projects, pictures ofthese participants then circulate as images of participation for a secondary social network ofimage-consumers, within and beyond the circuitries of the art world. As images and writings onparticipatory projects circulate beyond the bounds of a particular place, time and social group,they sometimes generate value for those who have invested in these images of socialinvestment, such as the curator who nominated Assemble for the Turner Prize. Thus, a modelof the value of socially engaged art practices needs to account for both stakeholder valuesand investor values. These ‘investors’ could include financial investors, but also those whohave staked something of their careers or reputation on the value of a particular sociallyengaged project. In other words, there needs to be a distinction in socially engaged artdiscourses between the perspectives of stakeholders (the communities, networks and peoplewho participate in a given project, willingly or otherwise), and those of investors: the broaderworld of curators, writers, buyers, art professionals and enthusiasts who stake something oftheir reputations and/or finances as they write, produce accounts, or circulate images,enthusiasm or criticism of a particular project.

I have framed the concept of investment, here, as predominantly a psychic, andsecondarily a monetary claim on a subject’s interestedness in/on a particular object ofinvestment. (Of course, such values extend, and are extended by, directly financial senses ofthe term investment.) In both of these senses, a social impact’s being outside of directfinancial exchange does not guarantee that it is antithetical to the financialization of socialimpact in a ‘Big Society’ context. Further, there are not only stakeholders in socially engagedart projects, but also investors, who invest financially and psychically in circulating images ofsocial engagement. Today’s socially engaged projects operate within a society in which it isbecoming easier and easier to align stakeholder and investor interests, by doubling the kindsof stakes that both of these groups have in daily life. Therefore, adopting a ‘double bottom line’method of analyzing the value of these projects might help to analyze the (often quitesignificant) social value of these projects for stakeholders, while also acknowledging thatthese social values are not necessarily antithetical to financialized values of investors.

Socially engaged art discourses

This distinction has the potential to nuance discussions of socially engaged art discourseswithin a context in which social impact is becoming financialized, producing new alignmentsbetween stakeholders’ stakes and shareholder interest. In order to appreciate this, it is helpfulto have a provisional sense of where these discourses come from. Here, I provide a very briefoverview of some of the most predominant arguments on socially engaged art practices, asthey have been theorized and understood from the late 1990s to 2007 (just before thefinancialization of social impact, exemplified by SIBs, takes off beginning in 2010). Many of


these writers’ positions will be familiar to readers with a background in contemporary art;since these texts have been widely written about elsewhere, I will only provide a sketch here.Nonetheless, even a glimpse of this terrain reveals a stubborn focus, which seeps into morecurrent discussions, around what are arguably the wrong questions in an era of socialinvestment: namely, whether or not – and to what extent – projects are properly ‘open’,‘participatory’ or ‘inclusive’ of their participants.

We will begin with Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (2009), and end with more nuancedcritiques of Bourriaud by Judith Rodenbeck (2007) and Stuart Martin (2007). First published in1998, Relational Aesthetics provides an account of 1990s art practices that aimed to providevisitors with a social encounter, rather than with a reified art object. Bourriaud pronouncedsuch art’s power to restore the social bond, and to revisit the political dimensions of socialrelations. In a highly influential text, Bishop (2004) criticized Bourriaud’s assumption that thesocial space of a relational artwork could be straightforwardly ‘open’ or ‘inclusive’. Rather,following Laclau and Mouffe, Bishop advocates for an antagonistic conception of social space.She argues that the most interesting relational art practices actively address or revealsomething of the antagonism that always, already fractures social spaces. (In a world of SIBs,stakeholder and shareholder interests are so gracefully aligned that perhaps it becomes allthe more difficult to pull them apart, to ‘reveal’ the antagonism in the split between the twohalves of the double bottom line.)

Two years later, Bishop (2006b) takes a slightly different target for a similar critique:writings on socially engaged art practices which judge the efficacy and value of art practicesby how “inclusive” and “genuinely collaborative” they are, thereby reducing aestheticjudgments of artworks to ethical ones. For instance, Kester (2004) insists on the politicalimportance of conversation in a post-9/11 world, in which truly open dialogue seems all butimpossible. Lind (2007) has valued projects for their degree of openness to the communitiesthey facilitate or serve. In light of this critical tide toward conversation and collaboration,Bishop questions the insistence that socially engaged art need produce effective dialoguebetween disparate parties. She reasserts the importance of aesthetics in socially engaged artcriticism, and advocates for side-lining ethical judgment when evaluating collaborative, sociallyengaged artworks. Throughout the 2000s, Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics inspired a spateof other critiques. Rodenbeck (2007), for example, argues that Bourriaud’s analysisstructurally and strategically disavows earlier social experiments by Fluxus artists – which werefar edgier, more fraught, and, oftentimes, more uncomfortable for participants than anythingproduced in the smoother international circuits of the 1990s art world. Stuart Martin (2007)takes Bourriaud to task for a lack of clarity around what, in his view, is Relational Aesthetics’tacit task: an immanent critique of the commodity form.

In various ways, all of these arguments revolve around the tensions between anameliorative, oceanic sociality and an alienated, antagonistic sociality. Arguably, we could mapsuch tensions into the newly financialized realms of the SIB by imagining that amelioration andantagonism have simply become interlocked in a more refined fashion within the context offinancialized social space. But this approach would not speak adequately to the specificrelational logics of financialized social impact – the ways in which governments, investors,carers and beneficiaries align themselves in this newly operationalized climate for socialimpact. Moreover, all of these discourses understand that socially engaged art practices willtravel further than their participants and will be extended into space and time as stories andimages. Yet further work is needed to theorize adequately the different stakes in socialengagement proffered by participants and online onlookers, the latter of which might viewinvestment-images of social projects, rendered in photos, captions, ‘buzz’ or art historians’

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writings. There is something in this differential distribution between participating and lookingat the images of socially engaged art projects that aligns very closely with the shared stakes,but distributed investment, that course though the ‘double bottom line’ scenarios of socialimpact investing, which realign stakeholder and investor interests.

Conclusion: The double bottom line

In light of SIBs and the financialization of social impact, it would be very easy to dismissAssemble’s Turner Prize win as another curator’s predatory move, turning people’s communityproject into an investment-image for the art world. It would be almost as easy to dismiss theopen art school as yet another example of the ‘Big Society’, which encourages investors toprofit from unremunerated activities with social aims. A school such as SOTD, one could argue,responds to the broader contexts of financialized social impact with something like adivestment strategy. Only by divesting investor logic from higher education, so the argumentgoes, can education truly be free. Yet all of this unwittingly echoes the logics of financializedsocial impact. It forces participants into an informal economy, essentially expropriating tostudents and volunteers the heady tasks of producing, and reproducing, the school’s values.The open school’s silent echo is the social impact bond, which whispers yet another (perhapsmore innovative, more complicit, more refined) version of its expropriative logic.

Yet it would be neither interesting, nor fair, to end with such conclusions. At a time inwhich investment capital has so innovatively woven its expropriations into the social fabric, it isall too easy to claim that ‘everything’ – even the care for one’s neighbor – has beenappropriated by investor interests, as enacted through innovative financial product design.Nothing, indeed, remains ‘untouched’ by these distributed investment-logics; and yet to makesuch a blanket claim would be to dismiss any potential in these projects for resistance. It issimply not the case that no such potential exists. Both Assemble’s projects and the openschools of London have had dramatic impacts on the communities and lives of theirstakeholders, and in so doing have rearranged the social fabric of their respective cities.Nonetheless, these projects operate in an austerity context, in which it has become moredifficult to ‘cleanly’ separate stakeholder from investor interests. Indeed, just as investorsbacked Social Finance-designed SIBs, so the Turner Prize ‘backs’ Assemble, turning its projectinto an investment-image.

As an art project that circulates as an image of social engagement, it is not possible for itto remain entirely separate from the cultural logics of social impact investment, with all theobligatory complicity that this implies. Yet even the desire to be separate from participation inthe logics of investment does not get one very far. As a critical stance, in an age of thefinancialization of social impact, this desire (expressed in much art criticism and many artprojects) may well hold open the idea, the hope, the possibility of an action actively opposed toinvestment logic. Yet in holding open this hope of opposition, the ostensibly ‘uninvested’project misses an opportunity for strategic intervention into the cultural logics of investment.

As Feher argues (2013), if, as activists, one does not like neoliberalism, the best thingone can do about it is to be neoliberal: that is, to actively take on the logics and languages ofits investment structures, in order that one’s activism can be rendered legible within thearenas in which it must operate. Liberal-era activism, Feher remarks (2009, 2015), such aslabor unions, often addressed the employer as a source of oppression. To do so, such activismtook on board the assumptions written into the liberal-era logics underpinning the workplace:for instance, the idea that there was a fundamental distinction between alienable labor in theworkplace and inalienable labor in the home. Precisely because of their complicity with liberal-


era logics of capital, activists made effective interventions (for instance, reducing the hours inthe work day). In the neoliberal era, oppression comes from investors, not employers as such.(A common response to workplace complaints given by employers is: ‘but we must keep theinvestor happy’.) Thus, a fundamental question for neoliberal-era activism, Feher argues, ishow to effectively address the investor as a source of oppression. In other words, how can theposition of the investee best be mobilized as a position of resistance?

Perhaps, according to this logic, what is needed most from socially engaged art practicesis that they experiment with their status as investees. This might involve not so much a futileattempt to shelter one’s project from the logics of social investment, so much as embracingthe double bottom line as an operational logic. As art writers (particularly working in the Britishcontext), it is our task to not simply repeat the clichés of complicity, assuming any trades ininvestment-images of social engagement to be artistic and political compromises. Nor shouldwe focus on accusing specific socially engaged projects of echoing the logics of financializedsocial impact. (This echo is all but obligatory, all but unavoidable.) Rather, perhaps we need tofocus on how projects thoughtfully engage with the distinctions between shared stakes anddistributed investment, which run through such projects and the images of social impact they,in turn, produce. Assemble, after all, might have been uncomfortable with the rarefied gaze –with their participants’ becoming-investment-image – which their Turner Prize nominationmade all but compulsory. Nevertheless, they found a way to counter-strategize, to turn theTurner’s investment logics to their own purposes, by using the Turner exhibition publicity tolaunch the Granby community’s shop. Such acts suggest that there are new ways to activatediagrams of relation between stakeholder and investor interests, to acknowledge andintervene in the new distributions of stakes and investment.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Emma Dowling and David Harvie, whose paper at the 6th Critical FinanceStudies Conference in Amsterdam, 2014, first introduced me to SIBs. I would also like to thanktwo anonymous peer reviewers and the editors for helping me improve this article.

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